[1] In the past, he worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center,[2] CertCo, RSA Laboratories, and Google.
[5] Yung is an adjunct senior research faculty member at Columbia University,[5] and has co-advised PhD students including Gödel Prize winner Matthew K. Franklin, Jonathan Katz, and Aggelos Kiayias.
He has worked on defining and implementing malicious (offensive) cryptography: cryptovirology[6] and kleptography,[7] and on various other foundational and applied fields of cryptographic research, including: user and entity electronic authentication,[8][9] information-theoretic security,[10][11] secure multi-party computation,[12][13][14][15] threshold cryptosystems,[16][17] and zero-knowledge proofs,[18][19][20] In 1996, Adam L. Young and Yung coined the term cryptovirology to denote the use of cryptography as an attack weapon via computer viruses and other malware in contrast to its traditional protective role.
[21][22] In 1996, Adam L. Young and Yung introduced the notion of kleptography[7] to show how cryptography could be used to attack host cryptosystems where the malicious resulting system with the embedded cryptologic tool in it resists reverse-engineering and cannot be detected by interacting with the host cryptosystem,[23][24][25][26][27] as an argument against cryptographic systems and devices given by an external body as "black boxes" as was the Clipper chip and the Capstone program.
[28] After the 2013 Snowden affair, the NIST was believed to have mounted the first kleptographic attack against the American Federal Information Processing Standard detailing the Dual EC DRBG,[29] essentially exploiting the repeated discrete logarithm based "kleptogram" introduced by Young and Yung.